I have probably spent a good four
nights looking for substantial case studies for Web analytics tactics
used effectively by companies, and I can tell you that there is a lot
of garbage out there. There are many trite, unsubstantiated facts and
fewer intensive examples that offer much more than shiny marketing.
But there still are those who don't
mind providing in-depth information on their strategies to success.
One that I found to go give a deeper than normal analysis is the case
study on Amari Hotels and the company's experience with multi-channel
funnels (Google Inc., 2011). The report could have contained much
more information, I am sure, but the company probably does not want
to give all of its secrets
away.
Multi-channel funnels is a more
sophisticated indicator than typical broad analytics categories such
as pages/view or visitors/month, so this example gives us a chance to
see the far-reaching power of Web analytics (Google Inc., 2011). This
company is using Google Analytics, which as we know is free, thereby
making this analysis available to any company interested in taking
the time to understand and use analytics to gain market share and
build customer engagement. In the end, this means the company can
make more money.
Multi-channel funnels reporting is a
newer way to show the channels that a customer used in the 30 days
prior to making a purchase (Google Inc., 2011). Channels can include
clicks on paid and organic searches, display ads, social networks and
affiliates.
The company is made up of 13 hotels in
Thailand and is a member of the Onyx Hospitality Group, which manages
40 existing or planned hotels in Asia (Google Inc., 2011). First the
company's marketing team analyzed the data. They noticed in the Path
Length report that 58 percent of visitors made their purchasing
decisions in one visit. The assumption had previously been that most
customers made their purchasing decisions over several visits, taking
time to research deals.
The marketers made the decision to add
more information on sales offers to landing pages to assist these
customers in their decision making (Google Inc., 2011).
Here are before and after views of an Amari
landing page:
Notice the sales listings that were
added to the modified page. Within a month of these modifications,
the company saw a 44 percent increase in booking rates (Google Inc.,
2011).
Later when the marketers looked at the
Path Length and Top Paths reports, they saw that 57 percent of
transactions resulted from “multi-path” interactions (Google
Inc., 2011). Most of the customers went to the site, left to think
about the decision and came back to book a room in one of the
company's hotels.
The marketers decided to increase the
company's coverage on the Google Display Network to “better connect
with these visitors after they had visited the site” (Google Inc.,
2011). The company tested expanded campaigns for the Amari Palm Reef
Samui hotel and saw an 11 percent increase in bookings in the next
month.
Here is the link to Google Ads'Display Network. The ads can exist in a variety of online media and show up on
websites that are “relevant to what you're selling.” To me, this
means that as the customer is searching on other sites, they are
being reminded of your company and its (hopefully) attractive offers
through display ads.
The company did not ignore search
engine optimization in its assessment (Google Inc., 2011). Marketers
used the Assisted Conversions report to look at “the relationship
between generic and non-brand keywords.” The use of generic
keywords led to increased bookings, increased the average value of
bookings and lowered the cost per conversion. This report can be
found under the Multi-Channel Funnels tab in Google Analytics.
Though the bulk of this effort was
analysis and hard work, there was some non-scientific human feeling
involved, too (Google Inc., 2011).
Here is what the Onyx Hospitality Group
Vice President of E-commerce Chetan Patel said of the decision to
take this new direction in marketing:
Understanding
cross-channel influences was a matter of hunch. Due to how much we
invest in digital marketing across all our brands, the lack of
tracked insights made me uncomfortable. Multi-Channel Funnels now
gives us visibility into how customers reach our site and
convert—from all our channels. It allows us to do attribution
analysis on our online marketing activities, looking at them as
combinations of channels and steps of varying success, rather than
last-clicked channels in isolation. (Google Inc., 2011)
The
idea of going beyond “last-clicked channels in isolation” is a
powerful one. Sometimes we as marketers think we are taking
everything on the whole while still understanding the parts that make
up this whole. Often this is not the case.
I was not familiar with the reports
that Amari Hotels used in this instance and am interested in using
them at my company. According to Google, Multi-Channel Funnels can be
extended from any defined goal or e-commerce transaction (Google
Analytics, 2012). Most of this information is gathered automatically.
Unpaid search from all search engines, referrals from websites and
social media sites and direct visits are already detected with Google
Analytics. You would have to set up tracking for Google AdWords,
non-Google paid search engines and custom campaigns to access data
from these sources in the report.
The Path Length report can be found
under the Conversions tab and the Multi-Channel Funnels tab. I could
not find an explicitly named Top Path report anymore, but if you look
in the Path Length report, you will see which path generates the
highest percentage of conversions.
Here is that report for my blog:
This next portion of the analysis is a
little hypothetical since I am not sure what are some of the other
steps the company may be taking. But let us say for the moment that
the company is not taking many other in-depth steps analytics to
increase sales and maintain a high return on investment.
Here are a few suggestions for the
company:
- Amari Hotels is looking inward, but they can significantly strengthen their analytics power by comparing their customer engagement with that of other companies in their industries (Kaushik, 2009). This Google Analytics function has changed somewhat since Kaushik wrote about it. Benchmarking used to be a part of the reports, but now if you opted in to anonymous data sharing with the company, you will see certain industry stats in a monthly newsletter (Osam, 2011).
- Kaushik also recommends site search, which you can now find in a tab under the Content section in Google Analytics (Kaushik, 2009). He calls the data in this report possibly the only place “in your entire web analytics data where there is no question about visitor intent.”
- Also, don't forget to look at the bounce rates for your top landing pages. That will give you important indicators about areas of your site that need work (Kaushik, 2009).
- One thing the Amari case study did not mention was ecommerce tracking, though it is possible the company is using it. After setting up this function in Google Analytics, you can look in-depth at metrics such as Time to Purchase and Sales Performance.
- I went to Amari's Facebook page, which has existed since 2009. And while they have lots of pretty pictures and videos of Thailand and the company's hotels, and have a little customer engagement, I think they could do better by publishing more sales-related posts. I think if I were going to Thailand, I would want to like the page so I could find out about deals, not really see beautiful scenes that I already know are there. It is great to have content, but I think they have strayed a bit on their social marketing efforts. Just as they had success with highlighting hotel sales on the main website, I believe they could have similar success on social media outlets.
References
Google Analytics. (2012). Setting up
multi-channel funnels. Retrieved from:
http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1191182
Google Inc. (2011). Case study:
Multi-channel funnels. Retrieved from:
http://www.google.com/analytics/customers/pdfs/amari-multi-channelfunnels.pdf
Kaushik, A. (2009). Google Analytics
maximized: Deeper analysis, higher ROI & you. Retrieved from:
Osam, M. (July 7, 2011). Google
Analytics benchmarking is back. Retrieved from:
http://www.famousbloggers.net/google-analytics-benchmarking.html
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